Substitution
seds strongest feature is substitution, achieved with its s (substitute) command. It has the following format: [address]s/expression1/string2/flag This is how you replace the | with a colon: $ sed s/|/:/g [Link] | head -2 To check whether substitution is performed, you can use the cmp command as follows: $ sed s/|/:/g [Link] | cmp -l - [Link] | wc -l
Substitution
You can perform multiple substitutions with one invocation of sed by pressing [Enter] at the end of each instruction, and then close the quote at the end: $ sed s/<I>/<EM>/g > s/<B>/<STRONG>/g [Link] You can compress multiple spaces as below: $ sed s^ *|^|^g [Link] | head -2
Substitution
sed /dirctor/s/director/member/ [Link] sed /dirctor/s//member/ [Link] The above command suggests that sed remembers the scanned pattern, and stores it in // (2 frontslashes). The // representing an empty (or null) regular expression is interpreted to mean that the search and substituted patterns are the same. This is called the remembered pattern.
Substitution
When a pattern in the source string also occurs in the replaced string, you can use the special character & to represent it. sed s/director/executive director/ [Link] sed s/director/executive &/ [Link] These two commands are same. The &, known as the repeated pattern, expands to the entire source string.
Regular Expressions
The interval regular expression (IRE) uses the escaped pair of curly braces {} with a single or a pair of numbers between them. We can use this sequence to display files which have write permission set for group: $ ls -l | grep ^.\{5\}w The regular expression ^.\{5\}w matches five characters (.\{5\}) at the beginning (^) of the line, followed by the pattern (w).
Regular Expressions
The \{5\} signifies that the previous character (.) has to occur five times. The . (dot) character is used to match any character. The IRE has three forms:
ch\{m\} The metacharacter ch can occur m times. ch\{m,n\} ch can occur between m and n times. ch\{m,\} ch can occur at least m times.
Regular Expressions
We can display the listing for those files that have the write bit set either for group or others: $ ls l | grep ^.\{5,8\}w To locate the people born in 1945 in the sample database, use sed as follows: $ sed n /^.\{49\}45/p [Link] The tagged regular expression (TRE) uses \( and \) to enclose a pattern.
Regular Expressions
Suppose you want to replace the words John Wayne by Wayne, John. The sed substitution instruction will then look like this:
$ echo John Wayne | sed s/\(John\) \(Wayne\)/\2, \1/
Because the TRE remembers a grouped pattern, you can look for these repeated words like this: $ grep \[a-z][a-z][a-z]*\) *\1 note
Regular Expressions
These are pattern matching options used by grep, sed, and perl (Page 441):
abc : match the character string abc. * : zero or more occurrences of previous character. . : match any character except newline. .* : nothing or any number of characters. a? : match zero or one instance a. a* : match zero or more repetitions of a.
Regular Expressions
[abcde] : match any character within the brackets. [a-b] : match any character within the range a to b. [^abcde] : match any character except those within the brackets. [^a-b] : match any character except those in the range a to b. ^ : match beginning of line, e.g., /^#/. ^$ : lines containing nothing.
Regular Expressions
$ : match end of line, e.g., /money.$/. a\{2\} : match exactly two repetitions of a. a\{4,\} : match four or more repetitions of a. a\{2, 4\} : match between two and four repetitions of a. \(exp\): expression exp for later referencing with \1, \2, etc. a|b : match a or b.
